seems that unbriefed formation flying has become a current topic, so here is my story. in early 68 I was attached to an armored cav squadron near chu lai. the cav had a gunship unit (call sign "Blue Ghost") that I had worked with in the past. on this particular day, returning a trip to Danang, I looked out to see a 3 ship of gunships working over a small group of hutches in a treeline and switched over to their freq. it looked a lot like a gunnery range traffic pattern, and they were ok with an O-2 joining them. our airspeeds were close enough so that part worked. the problem arose when I entered their pattern without total attention to altitude (it was below 1000'). add that to the small amount of target fixation and I ended up going around a very tall tree instead of over it. being the quick learner that I was in those days and the rest of the time was a lot more fun. but - there was more fun - "Hey Helix, would you like to join up with us and return to base?" hard to turn that down, so I joined their formation as the rear of the 4 ship diamond. things went well for some time, until with some unseen signal given, the gunships went into hover! O-2s don't do that so I spit out the bottom just over the ocean water and thanked lead for the opportunity. got even with them over their bar that night. FAC's must have had that guy upstairs looking over them more often than not. thats my story, cheers, Skip